Bluffing April 29, 2007

I learned something interesting at my poker party last night. I learned how not to bluff.

It was a typical all-guy poker party. Pretty much looked like this:

A guy in the game got burned on a bluff. After the hand was over, another guy (who had dropped out of the hand early) commented that the bluff was obvious. It was something he learned on some TV show about poker.

According to him, when you are bluffing, you subconsciously need to over-project confidence. You do this physically, by moving your chips into the pot too rapidly, and smacking them down too aggressively.

After the hand was over and we were talking about it, we all recalled that this was exactly what the bluffer had done.

So here’s my free advice for today.

Bluff slowly.

This advice applies to more than card games. I have found an excellent music selection to make this point.

[sonific=ad663a81b823025792f92b5e0d5635dd5e5c5a28]

BTW, I actually came out ahead last night. That’s unusual for me. I made enough money to cover the huge annual fee that I pay to WordPress ($20) for extra storage to save all the graphics on this site.

The most basic rule of trying to read unsophisticated poker players is that when they act stong they are weak, when they are weak they act strong. Sighs, slumped shoulders, hesitantly calling while making self-disparaging comments all indicate strong hands. Slamming chips while betting, intimidating stares, etc indicate weakness. More experienced players will maintain constant mannerisms or vary their behavior (act weak when weak, etc) in order to make simple reading ineffective.

A very simple but effective read on inexperienced players is watching their hands when they put chips in the pot. Trembling hands almost always means they have a monster hand and are barely containing their excitement. This doesn’t work on experienced players because they’ve seen so many hands it doesn’t phase them.

If the flop comes down with two of the same suit and the turn is the third of that suit you will see people check their cards. They don’t have a flush, but are checking to see if one of their cards is the suit in question. Inexperienced players will remember if their cards are suited, but frequently don’t bother to remember suits otherwise.

Listen woman, I do not go *potty*. You got that? I . . . never mind. I just ain’t got it in me to be descriptively disgusting right now.

Although . . . my wife and I were in God’s Waiting Room, a.k.a. Florida, a little over a month ago. We had a very nice, romantic, and expensive dinner of which mine included shrimp and scallops with pasta alfredo. You could have almost considered it soup with all the butter it was swimming in. On top of that, I had a bottle of chianti.

After dinner, I pulled the convertible over, we took off our shoes and made our way to the beach for a warm, breezy, romantic walk. No sooner had my feet hit the sand when I knew I was in trouble. I delicately apologized to my beautiful date that the walk was not to be.

Stopping and looking around I said, “Um, ya know. I don’t think this walk is gonna happen.”

She asks what’s up and I tell her, “I think all that butter in my dinner is acting like human Drain-o and we’re not going to get very far before the tide comes in, if you know what I mean.”

She laughed and shook her head, saying that once I stepped onto the beach, it became one big litter box.

We made it back to the condo just in time for me to re-enact the bathroom scene from Dumb and Dumber.

A side note: I’d like to punch the SOB who thought it was a good idea to put that extra button/fastener on the left side of men’s dress pants. When you’re about to blow an O-ring, it’s literally a pain in the ass to have to undo the right button, unclasp, then have to undo another freakin’ button on the left. Stupid bastard.

Did anyone else notice that compos began that post with the disclaimer “just ain’t got it in me to be descriptively disgusting right now”? Because that seems a tad … inconsistent with what he ended up writing.